MFen your wife has an aix server?
Yhg1s yes. an older one that one of her previous employers was going to get rid of.
MFen that has to be the nerdiest marriage in history, and i say that as a former husband of an IT contractor
Yhg1s (she’s been working for banks and other large institutions, doing AIX maintenance and development.)
Yhg1s hm, no, I’ve seen nerdier marriages.
gubatron lol
-Scratch- gubatron, #python is a no Ell Oh Ell zone

I strongly believe the REAL web 2.0 applications will run on something called XUL, as it is the web 1.9 not only runs on fancy javascript (aka AJAX), but it already does use XUL.

You might not know what XUL is, but if you’ ve been using Firefox, you’ ve experienced it.

In simple terms, XUL is a markup language (similar to HTML), that has a few more goodies that allow you to build rich user interfaces. When I say you’ve probably experienced XUL with Firefox, is because most of those wonderful extensions are built using XUL.

The only problem with XUL at the moment is that it’ s not supported by Internet Explorer (and I think it won’t be supported in IE7 which is a real shame). Oh, and it seems IE7 won’t fully compete with Firefox, I tried installing the beta on Windows 2000 and it wasn’t compatible…
Since a picture can explain more than a thousand words, I’ll show you a screenshot of XUL in action, and how things like this will truly change the face of the web for good.

Click on the picture to see in full size

From that picture you can see several things:

For starters, the gSpace extension (which I consider an web 2.0 app) allows me to use my Gmail account as a storage server (just like an ftp service).

It’s cross platform, all you need is a XUL enabled browse

You can use right click and have customized popup menus (which you can’t on regular HTML apps)

It has an extensive set of widgets that are not available for HTML, see the resizable tables all over the place. (Check out xulplanet.org to see how XUL works with Javascript and CSS – If you’ re already using Javascript DOM objects and CSS, it’s not a steep learning curve you have to go through to start developing with XUL)

” hmm, I wonder what I can build with this…?”

But the only problem is… it’s not available in IE, and it seems like there aren’ t any XUL plugins available for it (if you find one, please let me know)

So, I was looking for any solutions out there, and today Microsoft released another beta of IE7 with yet no mention whatsoever about XUL (come on Microsoft, you don’t need to spend millions in making people love you, all you have to do is release products that adapt to standards!!!, implement XUL for the sake of the web)

If Microsoft enabled XUL on IE7 they could gain something very valuable, they could gain all the Firefox extensions, or at least Firefox Extension developers would start making the modifications to be able to register their extensions in IE7 (if the IE7 team decides to enable an extension mechanism ever)

So it’s my hope that IE7 will include XUL, or maybe in one of its further “Service Packs”, oh, and also SVG support, then we could have full blown interfaces and vector graphics on the web, anything would be possible… but this is probably not in the best interests of Microsoft, they need to sell Desktop software.

So one day talking about XUL and it’s potential, someone told me you couldn’ t create products on hope, I’m not sure if that’s the way innovators think, but when you’re serious about mass distribution of your web apps you can’t be too romantic about innovation (Although I like to thing “If you build it they’ll come” and developers need to push for innovation)… however, there are some people that aren’t waiting for IE7 to include XUL support, and they’re already way ahead on the race of XUL development. Sascha Schumann is a long-time OpenSource contributor, book author and consultant. Programming for more than 17 years, he is currently leading multiple large XUL projects for clients. Sascha runs the XUL Weblog, a place where he shares his experiences and best practices when it comes to developing XUL applications.

One of the things that caught my eye on his blog, was a post that refered to a very interesting project that might allow bringing XUL to IE.

As every web developer knows, Mozilla is a far more advanced and cleaner web rendering engine, but it lacks something, it cannot be used as an Active X component, and IE can do this, and many applications already embed IE on them, examples are AOL, Encyclopedia Britanica, Encarta, and many others.

So based on this idea the Mozilla Active X Control project was born, they already have several versions of the Active X out there, they have instructions on how to install it and use it with VB.net, VB, C++ and Delphi. The Active X is only 4.5mb (not 10mb like the IE activex) since it includes the Gecko and a few things that it needs.

So yes, using that Active X control inside IE, you might be able to run XUL on it, but this still has to be tried, please be my guest, I’m not a windows user, and I wish I had the time to do more than blog about this.
And dreaming a little more, the perfect combo for a webdev, would probably be XUL + Python (instead of javascript) to have a real Object Oriented language and avoid problems you come across today with big javascript apps, (At least XPCOM components can be built using python) but that’s another story.

My girlfriend is doing a paper on how to distribute media (mostly video) through the Internet, and why we’re not quite there yet, during the conversation we started talking about the evolution of technology and she came up with a very interesting set of thoughts. This post will be about how people grew up along technologies and analizing certain factors to try to predict what might be the next boom for humanity (Are we still hoping for those flying cars?)

And Radio was Born

I guess I could talk first about printed media, but I so little time to do this post, and even though its a very interesting subject, even beginning from Radio, I still have a lot to talk about before I get to the point

If your grandma was born around the 30s, she grew up listening to the radio, since first commercial broadcasts where done around that time. Come to think about it, it’s true, radio has evolved from probably as a secret technology used in war, to commercial broadcasting, and now we have satellite radio, and of course the internet mimics it with radio streams, and now with smarter radio broadcasts that adapt to what you like, see Last.fm and Pandora. The best part, is that people seem to love this technologies so much, to the point that it’s hard for them to let go and move on, or being afraid of the next thing, specially if they’re too old. I say this because of the behaviour of my grand parents, they still listen to A.M. radio (and they still play the good old tunes and present news the old fashioned way in some A.M. stations, at least in Venezuela), they watch tv, but they won’t use the internet)

TV!

And then your parents around the 50s started tasting the first commercial broadcasts in Black and White, and then people started getting divorces, or women went to work, and probably your parents, or the generation in between, and probably you, and your little brothers have been raised by that magic box that sits on the living room or in your room (and that box is getting flatter and flatter each year).

My prediction on tv is that it will be actually a computer (that looks like a tv) and content will be distributed via internet to it, allowing users to really see what they want, whenever they want, and not only that, share content, and interact with people to know and to recommend what to see. Imagine you’re watching your tivo, and you get an icon on the screen, you click on it, and a friend of yours has sent you a recommendation to see something that’s happening right now, or maybe something he recorded for you… that’s how I would like to watch tv sometimes, watch whatever I want, whenever I want, and If I don’t know what I want, have my friends tell me what cool things I shouldn’t miss

PCs and Video Games

And probably some of your parents, are still a little reluctanct to get in touch with the internet, they might use the computer for very basic things, but you’ll see that it’s quite hard to make them do things more advanced, unless they have a very curious or journalistic spirit in them, to become bloggers, or understand what RSS feeds are, or go and learn html, javascript, or Ruby, and get themselves wet with P2P or all the things the internet brings… They still enjoy watching TV, they like their cable service (somehow)… personally I hate flipping through hundreds of channels with a lot of garbage and advertisement, or having to wait a special day, at a special hour to watch what I want, for some of us, there’s no such thing as prime time anymore, we’re too busy and we can’t waste time.

But then again, there’s this generation of people from 1975 ahead, that grew up watching tv, and around 1980 had an ATARI joystick in their hands, and then around 1985 the Personal Computer was available on the market and they played with the Apple // or the first IBM PCs, and we feel like all this electronic stuff is almost an extension of our bodies, so we can adapt to technology naturally (I want too see how my kids will do it). The best part of it all, is that we can appreciate every little thing that comes out because we have experienced all of it from the very beginning, nowadays it’ll be very hard to impress a 10 year old with the graphics of a PS3 game, at least they won’t be as impressed as me, who used to play

So Video Games are very interesting, they have a hughe market, and they can be played on that Magic box, on computers, and now they’re mobile (I gotta get one of those PSPs but then my productive blogging/coding life would be over, I know it)

Internet

So like 10 years after people started watching tv, some guys formed Arpanet, and I’m not sure when a guy in CERN came up with the whole concept of Hyperlinks and the web, but we were too busy watching tv and listening to radio, and buying vinyl records, and then CDs, and things started getting digital, and we got cellphones (which are a great great invention ), so up until around 96 that Arpanet I mentioned was replicated by companies and they made it available through dial-up, making it all over the place, and some of us tried HTML based chatrooms, and Webcrawler, and the reign of Altavista, and we all used Netscape, and we had our phone lines busy and paying big phone bills (at least in South America where they had no flat rates), and we tried ICQ and chats were obsolete, and then we tried Napster, and the best downloading music service ever called Audiogalaxy (when it was free and the RIAA wasn’t around) and that fax modem was burning hot (and public p2p was born, but some geeks like me used IRC to get the goodies, and people that were even geekier than me were using the internet way before this with BBCs and got stuff through usenet…)

Now its all broadband in most places (although a lot of people still need to get it), and connections are getting faster, and companies are investing in fiber optics and they’re starting to promise higher speeds of 50mbits, and then I think my girlfriend’ s paper will be very easy to write, at 50mbits transfering movies will be so easy, and imagine P2P networks with all that bandwidth. (omg, all the cool services and fields we’ll be able to add to those protocol packets)

So what’s next Guby?

So as you have seen, everything is an ugly, but tasty mess. The internet has put everything we did before on it, it’s been a meta-techonological-platform, and it exists because of many inventions, the Internet is and is because of Printed Media, Radio, TV, Music, Phones, Cellphones… so, let’s suppose one day, everything will actually be on the internet… no more need for current Radio (Wireless internet will deliver Digital Streams and Satellite Radio), or Phones (which is starting to happen with VoIP, or Skype, or when we have wireless internet all over we port skype or VoIP to cellphones), and TV the same way, and why not movie theathers, Movie distribution to digital theaters by download…

So If things will be the way I picture, for the next thing after the Internet to come… it basically needs two things:

Global Wireless Support

A Lot of Bandwidth

And there’s a lot of people working to make this happen, people working on stuff like Cognitive Radio, Internet 2, and so many other developments in the area that I can’t think of right now (read MIT Technology review, or Wikipedia if you want more insight you’ll find a lot there).

20 years ago computers were something for nerdy wizards, some people wouldn’t even use them, and software development or hardware development was a mistery to most people. And everybody said… If you study computers you’ll make big bucks (and for some this was true, and still is), but I believe that for smart people computers aren’t that much of a mistery anymore and you can go to school and learn, or if you have the time you can use the internet and learn how to do software, or learn about electronics and put a chip on a board and play with it…

So what is it?

So what would I recommend for your baby kids to go to school for now? what’ll be the next thing to change the world, or the next thing to become the platform for an invention as big as the internet (if the internet can be called an invention, or more like a hub for all technological inventions have found its own little space to interact with each other and make the whole system better and better), where the Internet and many other things will converge?, or work along with?

If I had a son/daughter I would tell him/her… “Study Nanotechnology, and you’ll make the big bucks and you might help change the world in the process”.

So as a computist, I know I still haven’t changed the world, and I hope I can change a little bit of it with software I’ll write during the rest of my life, but I wasn’t born back at the Arpanet when everything was still dark magic, where the decisions made on those project gave us amazing tools today, and also gave us big nuisances like spam (bad design of email).

Now,I believe, is the dark magic era of Nanotechnology, where only a few privileged have the privilege of doing research and development of technologies most of us only have a very unclear idea, no matter how much we read about it. Thank god, the dark era of nanotechnology is moving way faster than that of the internet, thanks to it and the power of computers nowadays.

I remember I first heard about Nanotechnology around 2000, and I thought we’d the the very first fruits of it 15 years later… well, we’re starting to see the fruits of it now, step by step, although I think there are many companies out there using the “nano” word for marketing purposes (please don’t think of the iPod nano as a fruit of Nanotechnology, although its a pretty cool and amazing device if you think of it from the perspective of someone who used a walkman in the past), there have been several developments in this area that are giving us better, stronger, lighter materials, and they’re starting to experiment with biology at nanolevels.

Nanotechnology is of similar nature to computer, but it goes beyond it. Computer technology can help in almost every area of human knowledge but it can’t directly touch or be part of things, Computers are more like tools, where Nanotechnology can be part of everything. Nanotechnology can be inside your blod, inside your screen, in the air. I see nanotechnology is a very broad word to be honest. I think you can divide it in many different areas, and I wish I was an expert to give you the full lecture on it, but from what I know I can say you can have:

Nanoagents and Nanotools

Nanomaterials

(See Wikipedia for a better definition than mine, the explain molecular manufacturing or nano systems)

Nanoagents I see as nanomachines, or nanocomputers, where some or millions of them will interact with each other and with the target environment where they are deployed to fix, build, change it, or mantain it. Examples of what I think could be done with Nanoagents… Nanomedicine (already in progress there are designs of nanoparticles that guide drugs to fight cancer and other illnesses. Governments probably have research labs developing biotech weapons with nanoagents).

Nanoagents could help genetists too, imagine nanoagents that would go and fix your dna to avoid cancer or other ilnesses that are waiting to be triggered at some point in your life… or maybe you want to have a child with blue eyes…, and I guess genetics and genome studies can also be called a nanotechnology (but then again, I don’t know if this happens at a nanoscale or at a bigger scale, remember nano, is very very small, it’s at a molecular level).

One of my favorite, and probably hardest to accomplish dreams of Nanotech, would be the to use Nanoagents that can be spread in the air,land or water, these little fuckers would be smart enough to detech the different types of molecules and once deployed they would be used to alter the target molecules to clean pollution or help regulate the weather, change temperature, humidity, then transport them elsewhere and give rain, snow, sunshine, or clouds where needed, although if this was possible one day, it could be dangerous, mother nature knows best, although it be good if we fixed all the damages done to the planet. I can’t imagine the complexity of what I just proposed, how to power these little machines, how would they store molecules, and how they would travel, but then again, I think everything is possible.

Then we have Nanomaterials, which I would define as arrays of nano-constructs. If we thought of nano technology as geometry, there would have to be basic shapes, like dots, lines, poligons, ovals, then you use these to build 3d solids, and so on… Nanotechnology must have the same, and I know you’ve probably heard of carbon nanotubes… these materials are being developed as we speak. I read an article about these nanotubes being used on tv screens. I’ve also read about nanomaterials being used to recharge batteries out of solar light, so you could use thin films of this material as an envelope for your laptop, or cellphone, and just by having your laptop exposed to sunlight it would charge… I read about this and many of the things I’ve mentioned on MIT Technology Review.

Some researchers are using Nanotechnology to develop new disruptive data storage technologies, let me quote from TechWeb article:

“Nanostorage is potentially highly disruptive for the disk drive industry,” states the report from market research firm NanoMarkets. “It alters the boundaries between disk drives and memory chip. High-density, small footprint nanostorage technologies will enable a new generation of consumer devices, such as portable HDTV players as well as new media formats based around holographic memory.”

Some interesting uses I’ve seen on movies, girls using nanohairtints to change hair color at will… or imagine the same applied to the walls of your house, or your car. Could we use this to generate gold?, Nanotechnology if going too far will disrupt everything, and we’ll have people working at it in all levels.

So come back to reality and see how it works now for computers and the internet. There’s a chain, first you have people who barely hear about computers and internet, but their life is affected by them in ways they can’t imagine. Then you have direct users, people who depend on information systems, telecommunications, etc. Then you have system integrators, people who know the technology at a level where they can install it, and integrate it in some ways, and maybe develop a few basic things using things here and there… and these guys make decent money, and then you have people who disrupt and build the backbone of the technology, people like Intel engineers, making the cpus (and you can have very very smart programmers that know a lot about process architecture and how to use them with Assembler code, but can they build one?, I don’t think so), who do you think makes the big bucks?

So, if Nanotechnology were to affect everything, from how you dye your hair, to how you fuel your car (just imagine the decay of the oil era, that’s another big post of its own), to how you live longer, or how you decide the color of the skin of your child or how smart he could be, to how we can have all the gold in the world (and economic schemes as we know it will be crap), where do you want to be on the Nanotechnology ladder?better yet, where will you put your children on that ladder, I think it’s too late for you now, unless you’re about to go to school and you already took a few courses on phisycs, chemistry, biology, and god knows what else do you need to start doing nanotechnology

Little did I know this morning when I woke up, that I would end up tonight on the Nokia’ s Basement Theather in Time Square jumping with hundreds of people to the unique beats of The Prodigy. I just came home from there and I still can’ t believe it.

It seems Andrew (LimeWire‘ s Graphic Designer) told me about a week ago he was going to see them (when I was fiddling on The Prodigy’ s MySpace page), I guess I didn’ t listen to him, and then today for some reason I mentioned Prodigy,

and he said: ” I’m gonna see them tonight! ”

Me: “WTF?”

Andrew: “Yes, and I told you but I guess you didn’ t pay attention.”

So, we checked the site, and it was sold out, I was so pissed, then he shows me his iMac screen, he’s on craiglist.org and there’ s about 10 people selling tickets… Then there was some hope.

I went to the theather expecting to pay about $80, since the tickets cost $40. I bargained with a black dude in the entrance, he was buying and selling, and he was right in front of the people that check the tickets, so I talked to him, and I ended up getting my ticket for $60, not bad.

I went into a very very nice basement, big nokia screens, 2 or 3 bars, nice deco, nice background sound, good A.C, and there were a few bars on my cell, which made sense since this is Nokia’s place.

A hughe line to check the coats, fuck that, then It’s gonna be a pain in the ass to get it back when I get out, good thing I had my backpack, since I was supposed to go to capoeira, so I put my jacket there when it got hotter waiting for prodigy.

I decided to buy a Heineken, and they told me I needed a band on my arm, that I had to look for a Nokia dude. The Nokia dude asked for my ID, he just flipped it on it’s back, and he had a Pocket PC, which he used to scan the bar codes on my ID, then the screen turned white with green letters that said “Alcohol Ok”, damn it, I liked that!

on the background I could see the pod where prodigy would be doing its magic, there were drums on the left side of the stage, and the sound was very nice. I tried to go to the center of the standing space to get the best of sound.

Then this dude came out, blonde, some DJ, called Adam Freeland (best part of it all, is that I didn’ t take a camera with me, I haven’t finished the post and the pictures you see here I got at 01:24am on flickr.com – You gotta love the time we live in, and its only gonna get better!!!!), and he started his set with this heavy metal guitars, and then the audio went out when this sound dude unplugged a Mac Laptop… booooooo, the crowd went.

He started playing his stuff and people were pretty excited the first 5 minutes, then he played, and played, and played, and I even forgot I was there, it was pretty lame, to the exception of a few songs he mixed. The guy was very clean doing his mixes, nothing was ever off beat and I respect that, but his music wasn’ t really getting the crowd, and it was 9:30 and this dude was still on stage… People inflated condoms, and we all played volley-condom, till finally he left, they took out his shit, and 10 minutes later, right before prodigy came on stage… A bunch of dudes that were smoking pot in front of me, started a fight, security came in, people started pointing the fighters, and the show was almost starting and this fuckers were there resolving their issues, security was close and standing up blocking visibility, but right before the prodigy got on stage, huge security people came and took them out of the place by brute force… then a lot of people that were in the back crushed us to the front, and yes, I saw the Prodigy very very close.

There was this tiny little girl next to me, very cute by the way, and I thought she’ d die when the shit started, she didn’ t last half the first song, people started going like crazy jumping in unison, there was no way you could fall, your body would be in equilibrium cause you’d be crushed in every direction… at least for the first minutes, until some assholes thought they were at a ska concert, and by the second song I had to go to the back of the room to be able to appreciate the concert and dance and jump at a decent pace.

I guess the first time I heard Prodigy was back in 97-98 when they came out with The Fat of the Land, then I got one of their first Albums, and last year I bought their whole collection (used) in Amazon.com for very cheap… so today was a great surprise gift for myself, finally what I had heard hundreds (if not thousands) of times was there right in front of me, I had longed to go to a place with loud music, lights, lots of people, and I never thought I’d be able to see them and my longings came to a reality today, I’m so happy, I love living in New York.

So, I remember the first song was an oldie (I guess it was The Law), the second was a version of the new ones (not very sure if it was a version of Girls), and then on the third song Maxim said something like… “when things are hot you need to Exhale” (and everybody started screaming) , “Inhale, Exhale” , and they played Breathe and it was awesome (can’ t believe I was jumping up and down like almost 10 years ago).

Other songs I can remember brought the place to pieces:

Voodo People, Spitfire, Poison, Firestarter, Smack my Bitch up (definetively brought it down), No Good Start The Dance, and they closed the show with Out of Space.

They played for little over and hour and then it was over, too bad they didn’ t play more.

Hope you enjoyed this post as much as I did, as a personal note, I was in the concert and I could only remember my childhood friends Raul and Mauricio from Venezuela, we enjoyed Prodigy a lot, on the car with Mauricio’ s awesome sound system, and also on that underground club called “Espacio” (In La Castellana in Caracas) where we used to get drunk every saturday and dance the rough way (jumps, kicks and elbows), pretty much like people did tonight. Too good times, let’s hope we can meet one day in London and see The Prodigy in their habitat.

And Venezuelan Capoeiristas wouldn’t miss a naked Roda (or maybe just a little showing off) for anything in the world.
(I actually know a guy in the picture, he’s from Grupo Senzala, and he’s been known to be on TV for some Revolutionary actions regarding a Colombus Statue, he he, Hi Yoda!)

MySQLdb python module
Note: As of now SnowRSS is only the fetching engine, you need to build your own interface to display the posts it stores on the MySQL db, we'll add samples on how to do this for PHP and other languages on the samples/ folder. The idea is to eventually have a 'views' or 'guis' folder, and add SnowRSS viewers in every programming language that we need, like Ruby, Python, Perl, etc.

it's named "SnowRSS" because I started writing this on the Austrian Alps on February 2006 on a Plone Sprint. SnowRSS is an independent piece of software, and doesn' t need Plone to be used.

If you need some help on how to get it running, or you have questions about the code, you can always reach us here:

MySQLdb python module (need to migrate to a newer MySQL interface since their page now says that its OBSOLETE)

Note: As of now SnowRSS is only the fetching engine, you need to build your own interface to display the posts it stores on the MySQL db, we’ll add samples on how to do this for PHP and other languages on the samples/ folder. The idea is to eventually have a ‘views’ or ‘guis’ folder, and add SnowRSS viewers in every programming language that we need, like Ruby, Python, Perl, etc.

it’s named “SnowRSS” because I started writing this on the Austrian Alps on February 2006 on a Plone Sprint. SnowRSS is an independent piece of software, and doesn’ t need Plone to be used.

If you need some help on how to get it running, or you have questions about the code, you can always reach us here: